billionaire researcher ON A QUEST TO KILL CANCER

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the physician who founded and sold two drug companies to become Los Angeles' wealthiest resident, is starting a company with the goal of changing the way cancer is attacked.

Called
NantOmics, the company will build on the knowledge Soon-Shiong, 60, said he gained from Abraxane, the cancer treatment he developed and sold to
Celgene Corp. in 2010 for $2.9 billion. The medicine wraps a chemotherapy used to kill tumors in a protein called human serum albumin that penetrates the walls of cancer cells.

Celgene reported last week that the drug helped patients with advanced pancreatic cancer live a median 1.8 months longer than a standard treatment, a benefit for people battling one of the deadliest cancers. Soon-Shiong said he wants to extend that benefit by combining new diagnostic technologies and therapeutic strategies to improve care.

“It took 23 years from Abraxane being conceived to us showing now with conclusiveness that it works in pancreatic cancer,” Soon-Shiong said. “We cannot afford as a society to wait another 23 years to make sure that the patients get the right care, at the right time, at the right place.”

Since selling his company
, Abraxis BioScience, to Summit, N.J.-based Celgene in 2010, Soon-Shiong has branched into other endeavors, such as buying a 5 percent stake in the L.A. Lakers.

Return to Medicine

Soon-Shiong's latest move returns him to his roots in medicine. NantOmics, funded primarily by Soon-Shiong's California Capital Equity fund, seeks to develop medicines called kinase inhibitors that target multiple proteins to combat cancer in combination with Abraxane and other drugs.

The strategy addresses the ideas that cancer spreads in reaction to attempts to kill it, and that it can mutate several times from when it first appears.

“What we discovered, counterintuitively, is that when you start killing a cancer cell, one of the things it does in order to survive is to spread even further,” Soon-Shiong said. “It causes itself to form new blood vessels. We've termed this ‘reactionary angiogenesis.' ”

To combat that effect, Soon-Shiong and colleagues have tried combining Abraxane and chemotherapies with
Roche Holdings Avastin, an anti-angiogenesis drug that tries to block the new blood vessels formed by tumors to feed themselves. The combination is designed to feed the tumor poison, starve it of its blood supply and prevent its spread.

They have treated 40 pancreatic cancer patients with the regimen, which combines 5-FU, or fluorouracil, a chemotherapy; cancer drugs leucovorin and oxaliplatin; Abraxane; and Avastin, Soon-Shiong said. An analysis of those cases showed 87 percent were alive at 12 months, with a median overall survival of 18 months, he said.

Forty patients is a small sample, and Soon-Shiong said it's important the theory be proved in larger studies across multiple sites run by multiple oncology organizations.

NantOmics will join another of Soon-Shiong's companies, called
NantHealth, under the umbrella of a larger organization called
NantWorks that brings together supercomputing, semiconductor technology, and advancements in voice and object recognition. The “Nant” name has its roots in Native American culture, in which “Nantan” means “he who speaks for the people,” Soon-Shiong said.

‘Next Generation'

The health firms will be “next-generation pharma companies” that use NantWorks technology to better track and profile patients' cancers and develop new treatments, he said.

Soon-Shiong's goal is to bring multiple new therapies into human testing this year and next year, based on concepts he has observed since developing Abraxane in the 1990s, he said.

“We realized that by driving more drug into the innards of the tumor, you would be able to kill the tumor faster than anybody could,” said Soon-Shiong, who was on the faculty of the University of California Los Angeles's Medical School from 1983 until he left to pursue drug development. “If this was true, this would work for breast cancer, lung cancer, melanoma, bladder cancer, cervical cancer. That's what we set out to prove.”

Abraxane is now approved for non small-cell lung cancer in addition to breast cancer, and Celgene said it plans to apply for approval in pancreatic cancer this year. The drug also is being tested in metastatic melanoma and other cancers.

In advanced pancreatic cancer, Celgene tested Abraxane on top of the chemotherapy gemcitabine, and showed last week that the combination helped patients live a median of 8.5 months, compared with 6.7 months for gemcitabine alone.

In the 861-person trial, 35 percent of patients taking Abraxane plus gemcitabine lived to one year, compared with 22 percent on gemcitabine alone.

One patient treated with the Abraxane, Avastin and chemotherapy regimen is in remission more than six years after her diagnosis, beating the odds of the fourth-leading cause of cancer death in the U.S.

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